News Archive

Rising protectionism and geoeconomic tensions pose a major challenge, especially for the EU. In many cases, however, the key to strengthening economic security lies in deepening international trade relations, not in protecting domestic production. This policy brief presents four propositions on the future direction of the EU’s foreign economic policy.

Climate change has an effect on all areas of development in poor countries due to its impact on the agricultural sector. EU development policy should support innovative financial mechanisms for family farms. Another goal should be the opening of product markets and the free movement of people.

What economic policy challenges will the Eu need to face in the next political cycle? What policies should be implemented to overcome them? In our latest newsletter you will find three new Policy Briefs on EU energy and climate policy, EU asylum policy and citizens' trust in EU institutions, as well as a brand new Policy Report on EU Cohesion Policy. You will also find the new EconPol Forum, in which our authors discuss how Europe can secure its competitiveness and future prosperity.

The EU cohesion policy lacks clearly defined objectives and uniform standards for the evaluation of programs. This is because the evaluations are commissioned by national or regional administrative authorities, which have an interest in proving the success of their programs. This reduces the credibility of the performance reviews. These are the findings of a team of researchers from the ifo Institute and ZEW Mannheim based on data from the Cohesion Open Data Platform. It contains more than 2,500 evaluations of the member states.

What influences do several cultural values, attitudes, and the like, on economic performance? In this article, Edmund S. Phelps shows a weak correlation between continental countries’ relative endowment of some cultural attributes and the relative performance of their national economies. However, not all of the cultural attributes hypothesized to be important were found to matter for performance. And not all continental countries were under-endowed in some of the cultural attributes that mattered a lot.